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Online Services Slow To Address Needs of the Disabled

Olivia Norman, 27, of Washington, explains how new technologies help and hurt her daily life, as a blind woman, with The Washington Post's Kim Hart.

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In addition, Markey's bill would extend existing Internet phone service requirements to Skype and similar services that let users exchange voice, text or video communications over the Internet.

Various advocates of people with disabilities have lined up in support of the bill, arguing that it's high time that the law spelled out technology standards that consider the needs of consumers with visual or hearing impairments.

But tech industry groups say that such a list of requirements will dampen the innovation that's already making these products and services available and more accessible. They also argue that new regulations will drive up the price of products for all consumers.

"No one thought about these things five years ago, and yet these technologies are coming down the pike on their own and we need to make sure we don't stifle that growth," said K. Dane Snowden, vice president of state and external affairs for CTIA, the wireless industry's main lobby group in Washington.

Robert McConnell, a 23-year-old student at Gallaudet University in Northeast Washington, said Web cameras, instant-messaging programs and his BlackBerry allow him to communicate in ways that were not available to previous generations of the deaf and hard of hearing. "We live through our thumbs," he said of his dependence on his cellphone to send text messages and photos of sign-language sequences.

But video clips and many TV shows that are streamed online are often unintelligible to him because they lack captions. At the moment, it is left up to the producers of online content to decide whether to provide captions. CBS's Web site, for example, does not have captions for all of the network's content, but Hulu.com, a joint venture between NBC and Fox, often does.

Similarly, Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential candidate, has put captions on many of the videos on his campaign Web site, McConnell has observed. Officials with Republican candidate Sen. John McCain did not say whether his site provides captions for videos.

Captions are difficult to post with online videos because there is no common standard for how they are decoded and displayed, said Larry Goldberg, director of media access at WGBH, a public broadcasting station in Boston. The station is coordinating a coalition called the Internet Captioning Forum, formed last year by AOL, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, which is working to draw up captioning standards for content providers and Web sites.

The proposed bill would not extend to the homemade clips posted on YouTube and other video sharing sites but would require major TV networks and movie studios to include captions with Web-bound content.

"The problem is every video player -- RealPlayer, Windows Media Player, QuickTime -- works differently," Goldberg said.

Although made-for-TV content is required to have captions, they are not always easily repurposed for the Web. For example, if a half-hour show is broken up into smaller clips for the Web site, the prerecorded captions "can be garbled or destroyed."

Some companies have created programs that cater to deaf and blind people. FeedRoom, a New York company, has created a video player that can display captions. Audiopoint, based in Rockville, has a text-to-speech program that reads e-mail and news alerts over the phone in a robotic voice.

But the software can cost hundreds of dollars, and compatible devices can cost in the thousands, said Karen Peltz Strauss, who helped form the Coalition of Organizations for Accessible Technology.

She said she thinks federal action would help make the technologies more affordable.

But Vincent Morris, communications director for the Information Technology Industry Council, argued that government action would also lead to higher prices for all consumers.

"Our goal would be to craft something that works for the broadest number of people, and we're not convinced this bill is a good example of that," he said.